How Interest Groups Select Issues for Rating Voting Records of Members of the U. S. Congress

This paper describes the criteria employed by several major interest groups in selecting issues for inclusion in the ratings of congressional voting records. Group emphasis on salient roll calls tends to weight the indices toward a few issues and to present a polarized view of congressional decision-making that may be misleading. The results confirm Kritzer's (1979) argument that members' ideology is best captured by scaling techniques.